The top 100 most congested metropolitan areas, visualized as a series of tomato stems:

Includes links to PDF reports for each area which detail overall congestion and the worst bottlenecks.

Indiana Jones and the Fonts on the Maps – Mark Simonson takes on historical accuracy of the typography used in the Indiana Jones movies:

For the most part, the type usage in each of the movies is correct for the period depicted. With one exception: The maps used in the travel montages.

My theory is that this is because the travel maps are produced completely outside the standard production team. They’re done by some motion graphics house, outside the purview of the people on-set who are charged with issues of consistency. A nastier version of this theory might indict folks who do motion graphics for not knowing their typography and its time period—instead relying on the “feel” of the type when selecting. The bland version of this theory is that type history is esoteric, and nobody truly cares.

(Also a good time to point out how maps are used as a narrative device in the film, to great effect. The red line extending across the map is part of the Indiana Jones brand. I’d be curious to hear the story behind the mapping—who decided it needed to be there, who made it happen, who said “let’s do a moving red line that tracks the progress”—which parts were intentional, and which unintentional.)

Identifying the period for the faces reminded me of a 2005 profile of Matthew Carter, which described his involvement in court cases where date was in doubt, but typography of artifacts in question gave away their era. Sadly the article cannot be procured from the web site of The New Yorker, though you may have better luck if you possess a library card. Matthew Carter designed the typefaces Verdana and Bell Centennial (among many others). Spotting his wispy white ponytail around Harvard Square is a bit like seeing a rock star, if you’re a Cantabridgian typography geek.

From A to Z, font designer knows his type – a Boston Globe interview with type designer David Berlow (one of the founders of Font Bureau), some of the questions are unfortunate, but a few interesting anecdotes:

Playboy magazine came to me; they were printing with two printing processes, offset and gravure. Gravure (printing directly from cylinder to paper), gives a richer, smoother texture when printing flesh tones and makes the type look darker on the page than offset (indirect image transfer from plates). So if you want the type to look the same, you have to use two fonts. We developed two fonts for Playboy, but they kept complaining that the type was still coming out too dark or too light. Finally, I got a note attached to a proof that said, “Sorry. It was me. I needed new glasses. Thanks for all your help. Hef.” That was Hugh Hefner, of course.

Or speaking about his office:

From Oakland, Calif., to Delft, Holland, all the designers work from home. I have never been to the office. The first time I saw it was when I watched the documentary “Helvetica,” which showed our offices.

The strange allure of making your own fonts – Jason Fagone describes FontStruct, a web-based font design tool from FontShop:

FontStruct’s interface couldn’t be more intuitive. The central metaphor is a sheet of paper. You draw letters on the “sheet” using a set of standard paint tools (pencil, line, box, eraser) and a library of what FontStruct calls “bricks” (squares, circles, half-circles, crescents, triangles, stars). If you keep at it and complete an entire alphabet, FontStruct will package your letters into a TrueType file that you can download and plunk into your PC’s font folder. And if you’re feeling generous, you can tell FontStruct to share your font with everybody else on the Internet under a Creative Commons license. Every font has its own comment page, which tends to fill with praise, practical advice, or just general expressions of devotion to FontStruct.

Though I think my favorite bit might be this one:

But the vast majority of FontStruct users aren’t professional designers, just enthusiastic font geeks.

I know that because I’m one of them. FontStruct brings back a ton of memories; in college, I used to run my own free-font site called Alphabet Soup, where I uploaded cheapie fonts I made with a pirated version of a $300 program called Fontographer. Even today, when I self-Google, I mostly come up with links to my old, crappy fonts. (My secret fear is that no matter what I do as a reporter, the Monko family of fonts will remain my most durable legacy.)

The proliferation of bad typefaces: the true cost of software piracy.

Elegantly done, and some of the driest humor in film titles you might ever see, the opening sequence from Death at a Funeral.

Excellent (and appropriate) music, color, and type; does a great job of setting up the film. IMDB description:

Chaos ensues when a man tries to expose a dark secret regarding a recently deceased patriarch of a dysfunctional British family

Or the tagline:

From director Frank Oz comes the story of a family that puts the F U in funeral.

Got an email over the weekend from Tom Vanderbilt, who had seen the All Streets piece, and was kind enough to point me to this map (PDF) from the USGS that depicts the average distance to the nearest road across the continental 48 states. (He’s currently working on a book titled Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) to be released this fall).

And too bad I just learned the word conterminous, but had I used that in the original project description, we would have missed (or been spared) the Metafilter discussion of whether “lower 48” was accurate terminology.

A really interesting map, which of course also shows the difference between something thrown together in a few hours and actual research. In digging around for the map’s source, I found that exactly a year ago, they also published a paper in Science describing their broader work:

Roads encroaching into undeveloped areas generally degrade ecological and watershed conditions and simultaneously provide access to natural resources, land parcels for development, and recreation. A metric of roadless space is needed for monitoring the balance between these ecological costs and societal benefits. We introduce a metric, roadless volume (RV), which is derived from the calculated distance to the nearest road. RV is useful and integrable over scales ranging from local to national. The 2.1 million cubic kilometers of RV in the conterminous United States are distributed with extreme inhomogeneity among its counties.

The publication even includes a response and a response to the response—high scientific drama! Apparently some lads feel that “roadless volume does not explicitly address ecological processes.” So let that be a warning to all you non-explicit addressers.

For those lucky to have access to the journal online, the supplementary information includes a time lapse video of a section of Colorado, and its roadless volume since 1937. As with all things, it’s much more interesting to see how this changes over time. A map of all streets in the lower 48 isn’t nearly as engaging as a sequence of the same area over several years. The latter story is simply far more compelling.

So that might not be the awesome name that they’ll be using, but CNET is rumormongering about Google cooking up something oceanographic along the lines of Maps or Earth. Their speculation includes this lovely image from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) of Columbia University.

Unlike most people with a heartbeat, I didn’t find Google Maps particularly interesting on arrival. I was a fan of the simplicity of Yahoo Maps at the time (but no longer, eek!) and Microsoft’s Terraserver had done satellite imagery for a few years. But the same way that Google Mars shows us something we’re even less familiar with than satellite imagery of Earth, there’s something really exciting about possibility of seeing beneath the oceans.

Via mailing list, Oswald Berthold passes along images and a short article of the Earth from space as compiled by NASA, highlighting city lights in particular.

The collection is an update to the Earth Lights image developed a few years ago (and which made its way ’round the interwebs at the time).

For the more technical, a presentation from the NOAA titled Low Light Imaging of the Earth at Night provides greater detail about the methods used to produce such images. Also includes a couple interesting historical examples (such as the first image they created) as well as comparisons of city growth over time based on changes in the data.

Of course many conclusions can be drawn from seeing map data such as this. Look at the difference between North and South Korea, for instance (original image from globalsecurity.org).

Apparently this is a favorite of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

Mr Rumsfeld showed the picture to illustrate how backward the northern regime really is - and how oppressed its people are. Without electricity there can be none of the appliances that make life easy and that we take for granted, he said.

“Except for my wife and family, that is my favourite photo,” said Mr Rumsfeld.

“It says it all. There’s the south, the same people as the north, the same resources north and south, and the big difference is in the south it’s a free political system and a free economic system.

I’ve vowed to myself not to make this page be about politics so I won’t get into the fatuous arguments of a warmonger (oops), but I think the fascinating thing is that

1. This image, this “information graphic,” would be of such great importance to a person that he would see fit to even mention it in reference to photos of his wife and children. This is a strong statement for any image, even if he is being dramatic.
2. The use of images to make or score political points. There’s some great stuff buried in recent Congressional testimony about the Iraq War, for instance, that I want to get to soon.

In regards to #1, I’m trying to think of other images to which people maintain such a personal relationship (particularly those whose job is not info graphics—Tufte’s preoccupation with Napoleon’s March doesn’t count.)

As for #2, hopefully we’ll get to that a bit later.

Comparing the number of Starbucks and Wal-Marts per capita across the United States (the lower 48 at least).

Read more Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science from Andrew Gelman’s lab at Columbia.

(thx, jason)

Somewhere between the “most important” and “only useful” thing about the wide availability map data, GPS systems, and the sort of mash-up type things that are all the rage is the ability to actually annotate map information in a useful way by combining these features.

An unfortunately titled article from the Technology Review describes a system being used in Iraq to help soldiers with their counterinsurgency efforts.

The new technology … is a map-centric application that … officers … can study before going on patrol and add to upon returning. By clicking on icons and lists, they can see the locations of key buildings, like mosques, schools, and hospitals, and retrieve information such as location data on past attacks, geotagged photos of houses and other buildings (taken with [GPS-equipped] cameras), and photos of suspected insurgents and neighborhood leaders. They can even listen to civilian interviews and watch videos of past maneuvers. It is just the kind of information that soldiers need to learn about Iraq and its perils.

It’s a wonder that such systems aren’t the norm, and the software described seems quite straightforward. But a step further, I found this quote intriguing:

“It is a bit revolutionary from a military perspective when you think about it, using peer-based information to drive the next move … Normally we are used to our higher headquarters telling the patrol leader what he needs to think.”

Not so much the cliché of technology being an enabler or democratizer (that can’t be a word, can it?) Rather, there’s something interesting about how the strength of a military structure (in discipline and rote effectiveness) is derived in part from top-down control, but that lies in direct contradiction to how information—of any kind, really—needs to move around this organization for it to be effective. What does it mean an approach like this one works in such contrast to tradition?